Blazing Campaign Trails in a Certain 3-Inch Heel

Reshma Saujani, 34, a candidate for Congress, in Astoria, Queens, on Saturday. Her office made a Kate Spade bulk order.Credit
Ed Ou/The New York Times

Reshma Saujani has a lot to say about her bid to challenge Representative Carolyn B. Maloney in the Sept. 14 Democratic primary, and I listened carefully as I accompanied her while she canvassed in Astoria, Queens, on Saturday afternoon.

But as Ms. Saujani, a 34-year-old lawyer, described some of her passions — a public-private partnership to finance start-up costs for worthy entrepreneurs, the passage of the Dream Act for talented illegal immigrants aspiring to college — I found myself increasingly, and in spite of myself, wondering about her shoes.

Despite the three-inch wedge heels on her black patent leather shoes, after hours of walking, Ms. Saujani, a former hedge-fund general counsel and a successful political fund-raiser, seemed as calmly cheerful as she did at the outset of the day.

Finally, as we returned to her office, I asked: About those shoes?

“They’re the Kate Spade wedges,” she said, sagging slightly, as if she had only just then been reminded that she had feet. “They’re these politician-woman shoes.”

She had gotten the tip from someone who worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton. They are apparently something of an “it” shoe right now for women in politics: Ms. Saujani said that Kathleen M. Rice, who is running for attorney general, also wore them (a photograph on Ms. Rice’s Facebook page bears that out). The chief of staff for a prominent woman in Congress told me that she, too, religiously relied on her Kate Spade wedge heels (though she spoke on the condition of anonymity because she preferred not to be known for her brand of footwear).

I know. We, the news media, are not supposed to ask female candidates about their hairstyle or their choice of pantsuits over skirts or their shoes. It is irrelevant. It is trivializing. It is sexist. “You would never write about Chuck Schumer’s shoes,” Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand said in a New York magazine article in response to a question about her flats.

But the Kate Spade wedge heels are not just one candidate’s shoes. They seem to be the shoes of a circle of younger women aspiring to power or already in it, women directly and indirectly passing on to one another ways of navigating the particular challenges of being a woman in the public eye. A woman must look put-together, but not as if she is a slave to fashion; she must look groomed, but never be spotted grooming.

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How to do everything Fred Thompson did, only backward and in heels? Ask other women how they did it. At Ms. Saujani’s office, “we made a bulk order,” said Ms. Mullaly: a pair for Ms. Saujani, and pairs for two campaign workers. Ms. Mullaly said she had a friend in the State Department who raced around airports and bought several pairs.

The shoes: the Halle, which sells for around $300, has a round-toed front that speaks of 1970s-era barrier-breakers’ pumps, and a high wedged back that looks expensive and chic, appropriate for drinks at a new hotel lounge with tech entrepreneurs hungry to see their kind in politics. (Ms. Saujani, whose boyfriend is a tech entrepreneur, has the support of a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, and a Facebook marketing executive, Randi Zuckerberg.)

A $300 price tag is no small thing for Ms. Saujani, who said she had $80,000 in student loans from Yale Law School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Perhaps she sees the shoes as an investment, surely less expensive than podiatry down the road.

There was something distinctly next-generation about the sight of Ms. Saujani, in a red dress just above the knee, legs bare atop her three-inch wedges. Ms. Saujani’s comfort level with fashion, with showing off her own good looks, could be considered progress — the latest evolution for female candidates, who first wore versions of male drag, then graduated to the salmon or aqua skirt suits that seemed sold out of a catalog distributed exclusively to female members of Congress.

Ms. Maloney, who declined to name her footwear of choice, has tried to draw a contrast between her own track record in Congress and Ms. Saujani’s lack of experience in an elected position. Those hip heels run the risk of undercutting Ms. Saujani’s credibility with the people she needs to convince of her gravitas (a wedge issue, even?). It is a concern no man has to consider when choosing loafers or lace-ups.

Whether the news media discuss it or not, women running for office still walk a fine line when deciding what to wear. Their shoes had better be comfortable.

E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2010, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Blazing A Trail, In Wedges. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe